Information Takes Over

One aspect of the mini-projects at #sssw11 was to create a one minute video that was both humorous and contained reference to some innovative semantic technologies.

Our Mini-Project team, Don’t Move the Plants was intrigued by the signage in the residencia, so took that as our inspiration.  It is worth noting that all the text translation seen in the video is as translated by Word Lens, an iPhone app which translates words right before your eyes.

Don’t Move the Plants comprised myself, Esther Lozano, Andrea Nuzzolese, Ferdinand Dhombres and Luca Greco.

I’m at risk of over explaining the joke, so here is our winning entry.

I am sitting in a meeting room at work and watching our CTO Ian Davis bring the semantic web to life.

Clipper uses javascript ‘recognisers’ to spot properties and classes in RDF data returned from queries. So if Clipper sees a pair of lat/long coordinates, it shows a map.  If the results of a search also include some map data? The recognisers are already there and they just show the points on a map.

So, people introduce new ontologies that describe things. Other people write ‘widgets’ that know what to do with certain properties. If the people who write the ontologies re-use properties that other people have written widgets for, then half the work of visualising the data in the new ontology has been done.

It lives.

It’s high time I removed the dust sheets from this blog and tried to discipline myself to actually write something.  To be honest I think I should try to stop thinking in sentences of 140 characters or less.  Twitter has probably clouded my ability to think thoughts longer than a text box with a countdown.

So, change is afoot again. If there is one thing that Talis (my employer) isn’t, it’s static.  The Talis strapline ‘Shared Innovation’ is exactly what we do on a daily basis.  I am currently shifting my role from a purely library focus, dealing with library customers in the library world to dealing with anyone who wants to work with semantically formed data published on the web of data.

How is this different from libraries?  Well, to some extent it is no different.  We are talking about standardising the publishing of data in machine readable form, whereas Library’s deal with information published and catalogued in a fairly standard human readable way.  One of the reasons that it is so easy to find things in a library (no really!) is because there are standard ways to represent, through classification, where the main topic of a book sits, and therefore which books it should be next to on the shelf.

Thus it is with Linked Data and the semantic web, except here the field is so new that we are still evolving the ways to say things about things, and ways to find what other people are saying about things. I plan to explore some of this stuff in later posts.

So, over the coming months, in my consultancy role, I will be getting the opportunity to meet other people who are getting started with the idea of linked data, and sharing with you some of the first steps experiences that I too have been through.

Now, how many of those sentences are longer than 140 characters?